Essay: Speak Softly and Carry a Cage

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By this my sword that conquered Persia,

! Thy fall shall make me famous through the world.

I will not tell thee how I'll handle thee,

But every common soldier of my camp

Shall smile to see thy miserable state.

Thus says the socially insecure world conqueror Tamburlaine, in Christopher Marlowe's play of the same name, to Bajazeth, Emperor of the Turks. Tamburlaine puts the defeated Emperor in a cage and has him wheeled around to subsequent battle sites. Quite a comedown for the Emperor. And quite an ego boost for Tamburlaine, the former shepherd.

Manuel Antonio Noriega is hardly the Emperor of the Turks. But seizing Noriega and bringing him back to the U.S. in chains is a similar callow triumphalist flourish by President George Bush, the former wimp. Modern media saved Bush the necessity of lugging Noriega in a cage to future summits and election rallies. That prison mug shot of the humiliated former dictator became an instant worldwide image.

No one would accuse Bush of invading Panama merely to prove his manhood. (Although after Grenada, the Falklands and now this, an early mini-war is probably turning into a standard expectation for future Western leaders.) In fact, it is hard to quarrel with the invasion's success.

True, the ostensible reasons for the invasion were mostly phony: there was no danger to the canal; the White House itself had originally laughed off Noriega's "declaration of war"; Bush's flowery defense of American womanhood, based on a single murky episode of rude remarks, belongs in an operetta. True, Noriega's thuggery and drug connections didn't much bother anyone in the White House until Michael Dukakis (remember him?) decided to make an issue of them in 1988. True, the invasion will have no impact on the drug war anyway. True, there were less bloody ways to remove Noriega, before and since. True, the only legitimate reason for the invasion -- establishing democracy -- is not one America is prepared to apply routinely.

All true, but so what? By all reports, the Panamanians themselves are pleased. If democracy really does stick in Panama, and if the economy we ruined is expeditiously rebuilt, the invasion will have been worthwhile.

The rest of the world, though, could be forgiven for suspecting that concern for the welfare of Panamanians weighed lightly in America's thinking about the invasion. The lack of interest, for example, in the Panamanian civilian death count has been shocking. The New York Times and Washington Post ran hundreds ^ of articles on aspects of the invasion. You would have thought that even the fact of uncertainty and confusion about the numbers, which were known to be in the hundreds, would be worth an article or two. But the first article addressing itself primarily to civilian casualties appeared on page 23 of the Post 17 days after the invasion.